Fox are playing a dangerous game here (well, dangerous for them, at any rate). There is a very strong argument that First Amendment political speech concerns make this advertisment a non-commercial fair use (don’t just take my word for it; Michael Geist thought so too during a similar Canadian flap last January). And an express Federal Circuit Court holding to that effect would certainly set the cat amongst the pigeons for those broadcasters like Fox who continue to insist on restricting copyright in political debates which they host / broadcast. In fact, Fox seem to be the main holdout against Lessig‘s petition to the US political parties and broadcast networks to license Presidential debates freely after they are initially broadcast – either by putting the debates into the public domain, or by permitting anyone to use or remix the contents of those debates, for any reason whatsoever, so long as there is attribution back to any purported copyright holder. Fox declined! On the other hand, CNN immediately agreed; MSNBC started a dialogue with Lessig about its policy; and both ABC and NBC have now substantially come on board. Fox looked silly when they didn’t catch this wave; and, with their current actions against political advertising, they now look positively antediluvian.

Update: Lessig has a typically punchy post about this episode here. A sample:

It is time that the presidential candidates from both parties stand with Senator McCain and defend his right to use this clip to advance his presidential campaign. Not because it is “fair use” (whether or not it is), but because presidential debates are precisely the sort of things that ought to be free of the insanely complex regulation of speech we call copyright law.

… Dr Matthew Rimmer from the ANU College of Law said that Australiaâ€™s political leaders have already embraced new media such as YouTube and Facebook as political tools, and that the ALP has called for a debate to be broadcast on YouTube. He said both parties should go a step further to ensure that digital copyright issues do not become an impediment to the sharing of election debate broadcasts.

â€œWhichever television networks or internet media end up broadcasting the federal election debates, itâ€™s important to the health of our democracy that people are free to capture and distribute the dialogue of our prospective leaders so that they can make a more informed decision,â€? Dr Rimmer said. â€œNew file sharing networks and technologies mean we have more potential than ever before to choose the time and place in which we consume media â€“ provided we are not restricted by unnecessary copyright requirements.â€? …

I hope his call has a better response than mine did. In the meantime, when will Fox live up to their motto “We Report. You Decide”?

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Blogroll (or, really, a non-blogroll)

What I'd like for here is a simple widget that takes the list of feeds from my existing RSS reader and displays it here as a blogroll. Nothing fancy. I'd love a recommendation, if you have one.

I had built a blogroll here on my Google Reader RSS subscriptions. Google Reader produced a line of html for each RSS subscription category, each of which I pasted here. So I had a list of my subscriptions as my blogroll, organised by category, which updated whenever I edited Google Reader. Easy peasy. However, with the sad and unnecessary demise of that product, so also went this blogroll. Please take a moment to mourn Google Reader. If there's an RSS reader which provides a line of html for the list of subscriptions, or for each RSS subscription category as Google Reader did, I'd happily use that. So, as I've already begged, I'd love a recommendation, if you have one.

Meanwhile, please bear with me until I find a new RSS+Blogroll solution